So you've got a bug. Stack trace looks like alphabet soup. Your instinct: paste it into Claude/ChatGPT and wait for genius. Doesn't work. AI can't debug your code for you. It's terrible at understanding your actual problem. Here's the real move. The Problem With "Fix My Bug" When you dump 50 lines of context and ask "why is this broken?", the AI guesses. It can't run your code. Can't see your environment. Can't step through with actual values. So it generates plausible-sounding nonsense, you copy-paste it, and 20 minutes later you're down a rabbit hole. What Actually Works Narrow the scope first, yourself Don't paste the whole function. Find the smallest piece that reproduces the issue. Two functions, maybe three. Test it in isolation. You'll catch 40% of bugs just doing this. Tell AI what you've already tried "I added console.log at line 15 and the value is undefined. Expected a string from the API response." Now you're not asking AI to guess—you're asking it to explain your observation.…